Has anybody else noticed that organisations whose name starts with the word 'British' are all 'a bit shit'?
British Aerospace (cue smartarse who claims that they are called 'BAE' nowadays)
British Airways
British Broadcasting Corporation
British Council
British Energy
British Gas
British Institute of Human Rights
British National Party
British Petroleum
British Telecom
Quick update
6 hours ago
18 comments:
An exception: British Midland Airways (aka BMi). Haven't flown with them for years, but used to use them like a bus and was always happy.
Plus ca change - British Leyland
Good job I'm English not British then :-D
British Home Stores is OK since Phillip Green took it over I suppose.
BAT?
Thinking about it, even the 3 exceptions don't use the word "British" much.
The full name of BMI is tucked away at the bottom of their website. It's not even mentioned on the BHS website, and BAT sell their cancer sticks under various brands like B&H and Dunhill.
(There's also the band British Sea Power, but that's just ironic).
I watched a programme last night about British engineering feats of the 1950's. Featured: the diesel locomotive; the comet passenger jet; the Vulcan bomber; Jodrell Bank; the routemaster bus; the land rover. All of these items, despite having to recycle existing stuff during post-war austerity, were world-leading. Today, Boris Johnson has to ask the Canadians to manufacture his London bicycles. That's what we've come to in just 50 years.
Ta for comments. It's not just me then.
Assegai Mike, add about half the work on the atomic bomb (1940s) and Concorde, hovercraft and Hawker Harrier to the list (from the 1960s, I think) to the list.
British Morrisons....
:o(
True enough, MW. We were pretty big in the computing business too.
Have just been browsing today's Speccie, fresh off the doormat. They point out that for the past 10 years, BP's *actual* name has been Beyond Petroleum, having merged with the American oil corp Amoco, hence becoming an international - not British - conglomorate. Obama has insisted on calling the org British Petroleum at every opportunity, also conveniently swerving the fact that virtually everyone involved in this disaster has been American. I think, though, that brand equity has a lot to do with this.
RR, no such company AFAIAA.
AM, when you say 'we' I take it you mean Turing and his chums at Bletchley Park? OK, the context was different, but 'we' sure flushed the economic benefit of those advances down the crapper.
Actually no, I was thinking of companies such as ICL and Ferranti, but yes, the Bletchley Park people put together some astounding gear, most of which destroyed at the end of the war on Churchill's orders (duh).
assegai mike,
I used to work on ICL Mainframe development, and if you met anyone who knew ICL and IBM stuff, they all reckoned that ICL was better. The application virtual machine stuff was really sweet. Very reliable transaction processing in the late 80s.
The problem was that ICL weren't in the same league as IBM when it came to selling, and didn't have that "no-one got fired for buying IBM" factor.
BAE have been known as 'British Wasteospace' for quite some time.
assegai mike,
Stan Kelly Bootle would constantly refer to people who had left the computer industry and joined ICL, with similar comments on Ferranti.
His views on Teicher are unknown.
I suspect the 'British' in the company name would be similar to a Broon visit?
Would you be referring to the Jonah effect?
@Joseph Takagi:
I used to work on an ICT 1904 in the late 60's.
Executive could multi-program up to 4 programs if you could get them into 32K of RAM (which we could).
When I transferred to IBM 360's later they were a bit of a letdown in that regard.
Yeah yeah all you techies. But I can mend a bicycle.
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